Written by

and Jorge Fitz-Gibbon

NEW YORK — Federal prosecutors are questioning Sandy Annabi’s self-professed addiction to Xanax and said any decision on the former Yonkers councilwoman’s request for drug treatment is best left to prison officials after she is jailed on her corruption conviction.

In papers filed late Friday in federal court in Manhattan, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said it was “concerned that Annabi’s purported newfound ‘addiction’ to Xanax may well be yet another attempt to obtain for herself a benefit without regard to the truth of the claim.”

“While it may well be true that Annabi is being medicated for depression and anxiety, she has offered no evidence that she suffers any substance dependency,” prosecutors Jason Halperin and Perry Carbone wrote to U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon.

The government’s motion is in response to a request Thursday by Annabi’s lawyer, Edward Sapone, who said his client had become increasingly dependent on the drug.

“I can’t live without it,” Annabi told a probation officer about Xanax, according to a letter Sapone sent Thursday to McMahon.

McMahon this month sentenced the 42-year-old Democrat to six years in prison for a corruption scheme in which the councilwoman got more than $200,000 in payments from her political mentor, Zehy Jereis, for casting crucial votes in support of two major development projects.

Annabi and Jereis were convicted of bribery, conspiracy and extortion, and the jury also found Annabi guilty of mortgage and tax fraud charges for lying on loan applications and failing to report income.

Jereis, a former chairman of the Yonkers Republican Party, was sentenced to four years in prison. McMahon ordered both to surrender March 4.

Last month, in a sentencing memorandum requesting probation for his client, Sapone said Annabi had been under the care of psychiatrists since February 2010, a month after her arrest.

Sapone identified a cocktail of medications they had prescribed, including Xanax, to reduce anxiety, depression and insomnia.

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“(She) felt feelings of shame as a public figure fallen from grace and failure as a woman who failed to redeem her family name,” Sapone wrote, suggesting

Annabi deserved leniency because she had suffered enough.

“She also felt that she failed her constituents and added another stain upon her family. This is a pain that has overwhelmed her.”

Annabi was barely a teenager when she was forced to take over care of her younger brothers following her parents’ arrests on federal heroin-trafficking charges.

Her father and uncle were arrested at John F. Kennedy International Airport in 1982 while smuggling four kilograms of heroin into the country.

Both men, and later Annabi’s mother, whom prosecutors said had made trips overseas to meet with heroin suppliers, were indicted in 1984 and later convicted and sentenced to federal prison.

In his letter Thursday, Sapone told the judge that Annabi initially was prescribed 0.5 milligrams of Xanax “as needed” but eventually started taking 1 milligram four times a day.

The lawyer said the Bureau of Prisons’ 500-hour Residential Drug Abuse Program “will be time well spent.”

The program is offered at the Danbury, Conn., federal prison, where Annabi is likely to be incarcerated.

“She is totally reliant upon the drug to get through each day, and takes extra pills to deal with the slightest stress,” Sapone wrote.

“While Ms. Annabi cannot imagine life without Xanax, she would like to break her addiction. The fear and stress of going to prison is too much for her to handle without her crutch, but once she is in prison, she will do everything she can to remain productive.”

Sapone raised the issue of the drug-treatment program at sentencing but McMahon had seemed skeptical that Annabi would qualify for it.

“Xanax addiction is not the type of addiction that the court routinely sees,” Sapone told The Journal News on Friday.

“The court generally sees crack-cocaine addictions, heroin addictions, cocaine addictions. And so the judge wanted to know a little more about the details before making a decision,” Sapone said.

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Asked whether he was confident he had provided those details, Sapone said, “I hope.”

In his letter Thursday, Sapone also called “constitutionally excessive” prosecutors’ demand that Annabi forfeit more than $1 million representing the mortgages she received on three Yonkers homes for which she lied on the loan applications.

Sapone argued it would be sufficient that she give up ownership of two of the homes, at 45 Bacon Place and 245 Rumsey Road.

In their filing Friday, prosecutors countered that both Annabi and Jereis should be held fully liable for the benefits they received from the conspiracy, and scoffed at Annabi’s “not-so-generous offer to forfeit her entire interest in the 45 Bacon Place property.”

“The defendant has not made payments on that mortgage since 2009, the mortgage is in foreclosure, and the bank is expected to lose $164,460.68,” they wrote. “Thus, there is nothing left for Annabi to forfeit on the Bacon Place property.”

The trial earlier this year focused on Annabi’s “yes” votes in 2006 for the $842 million Ridge Hill development and the Longfellow School land-swap deal, two projects she had long opposed.

Jereis got a consulting job from the Ridge Hill developer after helping its executives get a meeting with Annabi.

And disgraced lawyer Anthony Mangone claimed he gave Jereis a $20,000 bribe from the Longfellow developers to pass along to Annabi.

Jereis denied ever getting the money from Mangone.

He claimed the rest of the money he spent on Annabi over six years — for student loans, home downpayments, utility bills and jewelry — was to win her love, not her vote.

But the jury rejected the “love defense,” and McMahon said she believed emails detailing Jereis’ infatuation with Annabi were fabricated years later to support the defense.